Brandon Crocker | Obama’s Minimum Wage Welfare State

Already hit hard by the impending costs of the Obamacare mandates, industries with large low-wage workforces, such as food service, janitorial, landscape maintenance, and low-end retail, are now facing the possibility of a 24 percent rise in the minimum wage, from the current $7.25 per hour to $9 per hour. This could, it would seem, bust many a company’s labor budget. But not to fret. According to the president, this will be good for business because“it would mean customers with more money in their pockets.”

Anyone who has followed politics for more than three days knows that politicians are prone to making some of the dumbest comments that supposedly highly educated people can make. This is one of them. It’s not a new one, of course; Democrats make it every time they argue for an increase in the minimum wage, as do a variety of liberal commentators. But that doesn’t make it any less of an embarrassment for anyone with a shred of intellectual integrity.

Where, an inquiring mind might ask, will the money come from that the president says will fill the pockets of customers? It comes from the pockets of the business owners or from the businesses’ other customers, who now have to pay higher prices. So how does moving the money from one pocket to another help the economy? The short answer is, it doesn’t.